Understanding the Difference Between Sessions and Users – 5:05

In this free Google Analytics training video, I discuss the difference between two metrics: sessions and users. Sessions was previously referred to as “visits,” and users was previously referred to as “unique visitors.” Google changed the terminology in an attempt to make things less confusing, but the old terminology was actually much more user friendly, in my opinion.

By default, all Google Analytics acquisition reports include session data, and omit “users.” This means that you need to create custom reports for yourself or your clients if you want to know how many unique individuals were sent to your website from a specific source, medium, or campaign. In this video, I show you how to do that, and I also include two examples — the first example shows a situation in which there is a huge discrepancy between sessions and users, and the second example shows a situation in which the discrepancy between users and visitors is much smaller.